The Mouse’s Tale

mouse nest

In last week’s post (Week 6) I made reference to the presence of at least one mouse having taken up residence in Babe.  The chewed wires in the heater box was a definite indicator. This was only one pointer though. And it confirms my thought that it was time for the dash to come off and get things cleaned up in there. As is the case for almost all of the photos of the restoration steps, these photos were taken by Volker.

Chewed wires
Chewed wires

The heater configuration in a Vanagon has a channel on both sides that goes through the doors and gets routed up to two little vents above the side windows. In a camper the driver’s side is blocked off with a plastic cover because the vents aren’t there. Instead there’s a storage shelf above the kitchen so there’s no use routing air to that space. You can see the dark rectangle in first photo. When that cover came off there was a collection of maple keys laying in there as you can see in the third photo.

After dealing with the heater & external body sections that had been affected by the leaking brake fluid, Volker took a closer look at the heating channels. And then he set about extracting what he found. Have a look…

Seems there a known shortcoming in the design of the air-intake for the heater that leaves a small gap at the top corners where it connects to the body… that will get taken care of with some chicken wire when it gets re-assembled later. And we’ll fill that drivers side channel with something else!

mouse nest
The top middle of the upper opening is the air intake and it’s a mouse entrance

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.